Entirely Artificial Intelligence

**Matt Muir** (0:00)
Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (0:03)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Page 94 My name is Andrew Hunter Murray, and I'm here in the iSummer Studio with Adam McQueen, Ian Hislop and Matt Muir. We're here to discuss the events of the last week since the last edition of the magazine came out, and we thought we'd start off with one which has been all over the news. It's the story of the Kruegerne Gazette, and the personal people behind it. So this is an online comedy account, which is mostly consisting of AI videos, and the people behind it have been in the news, but it turns out we're already familiar with them, aren't we, Matt?

**Matt Muir** (0:35)
We are. So I got interested in the Kruegerne Gazette in November of, during the summer last year, and mainly because I kept on seeing these videos kind of floating around, and various elements of the right-wing press saying laudatory things about, as you point out, this new frontier of satire.
And I was curious as to what was going on, who the people behind it were, and questions of that ill.
I dropped them a line in November, asking if they'd be willing to answer some questions. And they responded saying they would be perfectly happy to answer questions, but they were very keen on preserving their anonymity, because we live in a climate that is dangerous for free speech in Britain, as I'm sure we can all attest to.

**Andrew Hunter Murray** (1:10)
Private Eye? Anonymous, fair enough?

**Matt Muir** (1:12)
Yeah, exactly. You absolutely find to be anonymous if you so desire. But I was curious as to the motivation behind it, and also fundamentally how they were funding a lot of this, because making AI videos isn't free, and the better they are, the more they cost, the tokens cost money, etc. And so I just want to get a little bit of insight into that. And over the course of these conversations, I got the vague impression there was something a little bit odd about the whole operation. I couldn't necessarily pinpoint exactly why, but the man behind the account who styled himself Krookern Man, and who appeared in various videos wearing a Make America Great Again style cap with a very heavy beard and aviator sunglasses, often AI-generated videos themselves, he had spoken about having spent time in America, getting in with a crypto crowd, and I was getting curious as to what his beliefs were and why exactly, despite the fact that he said that he was very much in terms of in favor of satire and making fun of everybody, why specifically all of the videos that he put out were kind of pro reform and Tories and very much knocking anybody on the left. I'm just curious as to what all that was about.
Anyway, digging around and then over Christmas, we completely coincidentally got a tip off from somebody who lived in Ruka and saying that, oh, by the way, these blokes are convicted Nazi. Adam, I believe, has the full rap sheet over there.

**Adam McQueen** (2:23)
Yeah, it's quite a long one. Yeah, it involved, you can read, actually, if you just Google this, the sentencing remarks from the last time he was sent to prison, on the 8th of December 2016 by Mr. Justice Spencer. That was for the cruel campaign of vile racist abuse against Luciano Berger, the Labour MP. But it also was on top of six offences of sending malicious communications and offence of harassment, all arising from and hateful allegations against innocent members of the public that they were paedophiles. And there was an incident as well where he effectively made up a story about a pub, which was banning members of the armed forces.
And that resulted in that pub having to close and then death threats and arson threats being made against that pub. It was just sort of fantasy in his head. Now, we should probably say at this point that Joshua Bonehill Payne says he's now a reformed character and he greatly regrets all of this and he has done his time in prison. But you actually put a question directly to him, didn't you, in December?

**Matt Muir** (3:16)
I did, yeah. So we got this tip off and I sent the person to whom I've been corresponding, the self-styled Krookern Man, who has said that he'd been communicating with me throughout this time, are you Joshua Bonehill Payne? Because we have received reports that you are. And he said that he categorically denied that the person I was corresponding with was Joshua Bonehill Payne, which obviously wasn't true or hadn't been true previously.